Posted
by
timothyon Sunday April 11, 2010 @11:11PM
from the history-is-written-by-the-koala dept.

daria42 writes "Wikipedia's great for some things — like looking up the in-depth history of 4chan, for example — but not great for others, such as finding out the micro-history of the technology sector in certain countries. That's why Australian technology publication Delimiter has launched a public wiki site purely focused on the Australian technology sector — its personalities, issues, companies, and events. Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small wikis should be created for certain verticals."

You can't really conclude that. That'd be more to do with the fact that the site is less than 12 hours 'old', so not many users have written entries for it yet (and for that matter, there aren't many users yet).

The tech sector in Australia is no smaller or bigger than in any other similar sized country AFAIK. Most of it is dominated by the usual multinational suspects (MS, IBM, Oracle, HP, Novell etc.) but there are a few Australian companies that are fairly substantial in size (although these are primarily

Why not use the effort in creating articles in an entirely new wiki to instead improve or add articles for Wikipedia? Wikipedia as we know it today would be much less useful if broken up into thousands of subdomains.

But isn't the internet really just thousands of sub domains? And it's useful right? Even the Wikipedia folks seem to think that it is okay to have many sources of "fact" see also links aka references at the end of each Wikipedia entry. Is this a Wikipedia issue or just a problem with somebody else calling their user create collection of "facts" a wiki? I like Wikipedia and appreciate when people add to it but refuse to limit myself when people choose to maintain their own website(s) even ones that happen to

It does seem curious. In wonder if they ran up against some faction of US-centric "notability nazis" on wikipedia(in which case starting their own wiki is probably the most logical response) or whether they made the(arguably stupid) move of looking at wikipedia, noting that it didn't have what they wanted, and then making their own.

Distinct wikis are quite sensible when dealing with matters that aren't within Wikipedia's area of interest(the dedicated Star Wars and Star Trek wikis, among others, would be a bit much shoehorned in to wikipedia proper, for instance). In this case, though, the Australian tech industry would seem to be as logical a candidate for entry into standard Wikipedia as any other country's, if perhaps understandably less heavily contributed.

Assuming that the license isn't something totally off the wall, somebody could probably do a more or less automatic mass import; but it still seems sort of pointless.

When you get right down to it, what we are seeing here is basically the same thing we saw that came out of stack overflow. Jeff Atwood and co realised that sites like yahoo answers were a good idea but once you included all people into the debate about something very particular you basically get a mess of/b/arstards cloggin up the system. And that is how you got stack overflow.

I always thought Stack Overflow was created out of frustration with ExpertS-exChange's paywall.

I've had dentist visits which were less painful.I've dealt with powerhungry asshole admins in fps games who were more understanding.I've dealt with complex series of rules (i.e. United States Tax Code) which are easier to circumnavigate than Wikipedia's ego-driven drivel.

I've had dentist visits which were less painful.I've dealt with powerhungry asshole admins in fps games who were more understanding.I've dealt with complex series of rules (i.e. United States Tax Code) which are easier to circumnavigate than Wikipedia's ego-driven drivel.

And my edits were on non-mainstream articles.

I concur, we need a wikipedia like tool dumb down to a myspace/geocites level

I concur, we need a wikipedia like tool dumb down to a myspace/geocites level

This exists. It used to be called Wikicities and is now called Wikia. Essentially it's a set of wikis for everything that won't fit in an encyclopedia. And I recommend it for any vertical [wikipedia.org] that can stand the ads.

Why not use the effort in creating articles in an entirely new wiki to instead improve or add articles for Wikipedia?

Because your work is likely to be deleted. Not every little tech company meets wikipedia's notability standards.

A few years ago, I added a bunch of pages on CMSs, and especially open source enterprise CMSs, to the Dutch wikipedia. Some of those were immediately deleted because it wasn't interesting enough and few other articles linked to them, although I imagine a lot of people would be interested in that sort of info. A specialised tech wiki would definitely help out there.

Wikipedia can't be the solution to every information-gathering problem. And despite some slogans to the contrary, it clearly doesn't want to be. It has policies of Notabiliy, No Original Research, and Neutral Point of View that effectively make it unsuitable for certain information. If you want in-depth, exhaustive information about other topics, you consult a more specialized resource, such as drum and bugle corps [drumcorpswiki.com], Star Wars [wookiepedia.org], Star Trek [memory-alpha.org], garden flowers [gardenology.org], movies [imdb.com], Pokémon [bulbagarden.net], Peter Pan [peterphile.info], travel [wikitravel.org], alternate [conservapedia.com]

No, it wasn't. Some business in Australia unconnected with the Wikimedia crowd decided to put up their own wiki (running MediaWiki, like half of the other wikis out there). Good for them.

Why didn't Slashdot cover it when Penny Arcade got their own Wikipedia [wikia.com] ? Oh wait, it was because that didn't happen, the same way Australia didn't get their own Wikipedia for technology.

Anyhow, if someone's going to give the Land Down Under their own honest-to-goodness Wikipedia wiki, I think it should be about ways to get rid of invasive species. Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?

Any Aussies here? You've got what: rabbits, poisonous toads, some kind of insect, and.... what else?Much of Australia's wildlife has been decimated by introduced species. You left out foxes, cats, carp and I think the insect you refer to is the European wasp, or maybe it is fire ants, both of which are wild.

Probably the worst invasive species is Homo sapiens, which brought in all the other species (that includes our indigenous people, who introduced the dingo a few thousand years ago, decimating wildlife on

Er, what? Eucalypts prove the poster's point. They're so well-suited to surviving Australian bushfires they dominated the continent. If you're going to link wikipedia, I suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus [wikipedia.org] which goes into considerably more detail. For a relevant excerpt, "With the arrival of the first humans about 50 thousand years ago, fires became much more frequent and the fire-loving eucalypts soon came to account for roughly 70% of Australian forest."

a dedicated wiki will always have better chances of attracting people with knowledge on a certain very specific subject, so yeah, it's a good idea. however, i'd like to see all such sites heavily integrated with and indexed by wikipedia itself, so that finding the information is easier.

Yeah, I've maintain a 20,000 article wiki about a specific topic and every time I've made even minor changes to the topic's article on wikipedia they get reverted/changed to inaccurate statements and so then I end up spending half a day looking up arcane wikipedia rules to justify my edits (which eventually stand up) but only after all the hassle of fighting with the reverters/deletionists.

I'm much more inclined towards dumping my archives and knowledge of the Australian computer industry, especially from the 1980s when I was in the loop with many key players, into something like this than trying to make more than the most minor edits to Wikipedia itself.

For some time I've been saying it would be best if Wikipedia could connect relatively seamlessly with specialised wikis where each local or narrow community could manage their own authentication process.

If I could find some way of better covering living expenses short of selling my soul to assist somebody else's agenda, I could easily spend a hopefully longish retirement working mostly on similar projects. The only problem is that I'm sitting on at least half a dozen other areas where I have more again that should be made available and I doubt Aubrey de Grey is going to keep me alive long enough to get them all done.

For some time I've been saying it would be best if Wikipedia could connect relatively seamlessly with specialised wikis where each local or narrow community could manage their own authentication process.

This sort of happens. Different areas have different groups of active editors who tend to be the main participants in discussions, and different norms end up prevailing. Some of them are even codified, so e.g. academics [wikipedia.org] and fiction [wikipedia.org] have their own separate notability policies. It happens even more as areas ge

If these people really are notable, even in a niche, and there are decent references to cite for their articles, Wikipedia will eventually create articles for them.

There are ways to keep a specialist encyclopedia ahead of Wikipedia's coverage of that specialty, but they usually involve having a lot of expert authors, and/or decades of previous work that's hard to replicate. For example, Wikipedia's coverage of classical Greek and Rome isn't as good as one of the massive multi-volume encyclopedia sets on the

Wow, you mean there's a wiki *besides* wikipedia, out there on the web? One that deals with a specialized topic in more detail than would be appropriate for wikipedia? That's amazing, a definite first, thanks a lot timothy!

No you didn't. Or to be more precise, it's what you thought was an Australian accent, but which is in fact as far from a normal Aussie accent as true English is to a US citizen;-). Let's face it, most imposters can't even pronounce "G'day" (No, it's not "Gooday") properly. Can you mate?

I was just giving a counterexample to the saying popularized by Weinreich. And even though Switzerland doesn't have much of a navy [wikipedia.org], Mongolia is landlocked too, yet nobody disputes that Mongolian is a language.

It doesn't help that hardly anyone speaks with the accent they're aiming for anyway. The only people I know who speak live that are from up in the far north. Personally, my favourite Australian accent is the one used in old ABC documentaries (like A Big Country), which would be relatively easy for English actors to imitate, and my least favourite is the Melburnian accent, with its ghastly short vowels (a dislike which has nothing to do with state predjudice), although AIUI some northeastern US accents are s

Wikipedia doesn't want full depth coverage of specific areas. Once they wanted to contain the "sum of human knowledge" (including catch rates for pokemon) but these days they want to be an online encyclopaedia based on reputable sources. They encourage you to go off and make your own wiki if you want to have deep coverage of a particular area.

For example the article on 4chan contains superficial background information. There is another entire wiki dedicated to the full history of 4chan and the memes it generates. The wikipedia article focuses on Project Chanology and/b/ because that is probably what got 4chan the most press coverage (which is what wikipedia admins like to base articles on, but hardly covers all knowledge of a subject).

Wikipedia wants you to write encyclopedia articles. They don't just want an infodump of "non-encyclopaedic" information. If you do the latter they will tell you to take you "non-notable fancruft" to another wiki.

Wikipedia wants you to write encyclopedia articles. They don't just want an infodump of "non-encyclopaedic" information. If you do the latter they will tell you to take you "non-notable fancruft" to another wiki.

Looking at the significant number of infodumps of "non-encyclopaedic" information that Wikipedia has... I really wonder about that. Every damm minor pornstar has his or her own article (usually a stub). Every damm player who ever wore a uniform for a major sports team has his or here on article (

That's not really true. I've personally written articles on obscure German politicians, for example, and gotten no pushback at all. If you write a decent stub, and include a few citations to reputable sources, nobody will even blink at it. The citations don't even have to be in English--- a cite to some mainstream German newspapers, or to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, is plenty.

The problem is, if something is not notable in the USA, then it is not notable for Wikipedia at all.

There is an article on my last name. 0.0001% of the population of the USA shares my last name, which is Aramaic. Hell, most people trip over the spelling/speaking of it since two of the letters in it are never seen in that order in any English word. (Even though it's only 6 letters long, it really trips up people due to that reversal)

But again, it's certainly not of ANY real relevance to the US, other than

There is an article on my last name. 0.0001% of the population of the USA shares my last name, which is Aramaic. Hell, most people trip over the spelling/speaking of it since two of the letters in it are never seen in that order in any English word. (Even though it's only 6 letters long, it really trips up people due to that reversal)

Probably would have been roughly as effective to publish an article in a major mag or popular blog saying "Hey, we need more coverage in wikipedia, please contribute."

Why is this worse? Because the small wikis don't have the infrastructure. Financial, technical, and human resources- the volunteers who have spent years figuring out the best available way to do stuff, Etc. etc.

On the plus side, something relatively obscure gets shuffled off into its own wiki. I only wish the same could be said of all the extensive articles on various fictional universes...

Probably would have been roughly as effective to publish an article in a major mag or popular blog saying "Hey, we need more coverage in wikipedia, please contribute."

As several other comments to this article have pointed, out, smaller wikis have different standards of inclusion and thus won't necessarily be so trigger-happy on the delete button. Do you want to have to train every contributor on the fine points of defending a particular source's reliability?

There's also the fact that wikipedia removes anything "not notable." What is "not notable" is usually whatever a bunch of wikipedia bureaucrats decide. Wikipedia, being run by your traditional fatnerd, is more likely to label this sort of stuff as "not notable" as opposed to something they would find notable (like the made-up histories of individual Final Fantasy characters or the stats of pokemon characters).

This is a very popular opinion on Slashdot, but it's simply not true. Notability is determined by sources [wikipedia.org]. In fact, your Pokemon example is particularly dated; in 2007 most of the Pokemon articles were deemed not notable [wikipedia.org] and merged into what's now very well sourced coverage.

General comments against Wikipedia notability get modded up because most people have had something deleted. Specific comments that specify what got deleted get modded down because most of the time it wasn't actually notable at all.

I'm not all talk, though. If anyone reading this ever actually is the victim of some beaurocrat's arbitrary preferences, leave me a message [wikipedia.org] and I'll make sure any article that passes the inclusion requirements gets to stay. There's a whole Article Rescue Squadron [wikipedia.org] full of people who are willing to do something about the problem instead of just whining about it on Slashdot. Yeah, I get it, "I don't have the time to join a Wikipedia group, Wikipedia can go fuck itself, it's a lost cause"... but you've got plenty of time to complain about it here.

On the contrary, I used to edit wikipedia, I know exactly what sorts of games you wikipedia bureaucrats play. It's exactly like nerds are trying to roleplay a bureaucracy. I'm glad I stopped trying to contribute to that site a long time ago.

Though, my reasons had little to do with notability. Although I should mention that something can be put up for a vote over and over again until it finally passes, in which case it can't be easily put up again; you guys did that to the GNAA article, after all.

You just don't get it - people talk here on Slashdot because they are tired of Wikipedia bureaucratic fights. They don't want to get involved because they've been wounded before and don't want to get shot at again.

I used to work at a soup kitchen, but I got tired of all the beaurocracy. Once I made a pot of soup that didn't meet their byzantine sanitation requirements, and they threw it out! An insult to my perfect cooking! Screw that.

Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created for certain verticals.

Wikipedia aims to be a general encyclopedia, larger and more thorough than any print encyclopedia to be sure, but it's still a general reference. Of course more specific references should be created. It's not like this is a new idea: search Amazon for books titled Encyclopedia of... and you'll find thousands, many (though probably not most) of which are serious scholarly works.

Excepting mathematics and the sciences, which are arguably applicable to the whole of human experience in one way or another, practically every other area of human knowledge has a highly specialized audience to one degree or another. Every last possible detail about pre-1947 aircraft engines, for example, might be of great interest to aerospace historians and engineers, but it's probably not of much interest to anyone else. Or an encyclopedic reference to every last town in Ohio might be hugely interesting to Ohioans and genealogists, and at least occasionally significant to broader research, but again, of limited interest to the general public. Unless Wikipedia (and its donors) are prepared to maintain a comprehensive reference to the entire body of human knowledge, specialist references are unavoidable.

Finally, the quality of the articles in those specialist references might be higher than in Wikipedia. Every field has sloppy researchers and trolls, of course, but a relatively specialized field probably has a smaller proportion of both than would be attracted to a general reference, within certain limits, e.g., one could reasonably expect a wiki devoted to quaternions to have better writers and fewer trolls than AbortionPedia.

I want a wiki that contains a coredump of all human knowledge, notable or not. I'd get stuck in even worse wikiloops.

You know about some obscure film that was a knockoff of batman produced by 2 Chileans and a Russian in Azerbaijan in 1974?BRING IT ON. I want to know the life story of the three producer/director/actors as well. What the name of their third cat was. What brand of cigarettes they smoked. Everything is notable.

I want a wiki that contains a coredump of all human knowledge, notable or not. I'd get stuck in even worse wikiloops.

Then just start it. I'll happily contribute the article "List of positive integer numbers which have exactly two digits when written in standard decimal notation without leading zeros." Yes, I know those numbers!:-)

Apart from a bunch of data pages on locally prominent sports, Whirlpool is very much a now reference.

Delimiter seems to be aiming more for a sociological view of Australian IT.

For me the simple test was Microbee, the only locally developed computer which ever gained significant market share and which is prominent in Delimiter's wiki [delimiter.com.au] but absent from Whirlpool.

Clearly the publicity here is already doing some Delimiter good as there are already quite a few more pages and categories than when I looked a few hou

I was editing on the Creatures Wiki [creatureswiki.net] in late 2004, and launched WikiFur [wikifur.com] in July 2005 - in part, because Wikipedia didn't want detailed articles on that particular topic. You're a little late to the party, but welcome.:-)

...leading to the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created for certain verticals.

The first time I heard a sales guy use the term "verticals," I stopped him because I had no idea what that meant. He said that verticals are markets - health care, construction, etc. I said, "so a vertical is an industry?" Yep, he said.

I still hear the term a lot and think it's useless. To me, "vertical" implies a chain of processes leading towards a finished product. For example, the old railroad tycoons wou

Wikipedia would have this, and lots of other content, if there wasn't those guys who are known as The Deletionists who pretty much delete every article which isn't controversial mess. Non-controversial topics don't have many people keeping a close eye on them, and when they get flagged for deletion, nobody really notices that before too late.

"Australian technology, what's that? Never heard, DELETE!"

I just found that there's a Wikipedia entry deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] despite the fact that this clearly isn't what you would normally consider encyclopedic material. I wonder why the deletionists didn't delete it.

If your sources are not quotable (say, you know some a traditional technique that was passed from father to son), if the sources are obscure (a photo with a name tag, in a school's yearbook, school already closed, yearbook in town's archives), if the sources are volatile (you write the article on a current event as you hear it reported over the radio), if the sources are inaccessible for wider public (you publish an article on ancient text in a

The problem is that Wikipedia accepts only stuff printed on paper as source (its not quite, but close enough), this makes it close to impossible in some regions to write content. Look at homebrew on consoles, you can find tons of information about it out there or just try it yourself, but you hardly find anything about it in the mainstream press or ever the gaming press. The best you can find is some rather useless generic talk that doesn't tell you more then "it exists". The reason for that is simply that